Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 4170
floppy drive and esd don't play nice together on laptops
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:51 EDT
I have noticed that the floppy drives of at least 2 different laptops of mine will not function (can't mount /dev/fd*, even as root) so long as esd (the enlightenment sound deamon) is running. Esd doesn't need to be serving any sound apps at the time, the drive will fail as long as it has served some app before you try to access the floppy drive. (That is, I believe everything is fine until the first sound sample is played, but there after the drive will not function properly.) Of course the work around is to temporarily kill esd, but that is not all that desireable. (Sometimes it is sufficient to issue: esdctl off and then esdctl on.) It has been suggested that this is really a problem of the underlying hardware in some laptops, in that there may be only 1 controller for both the sound card and the floppy drive. I just thought that I would make a note of it on bugzilla so that at least others would not spend too much time puzzling over the fact that their floppy drive does not work. This bug was spotted on both a Toshiba Satallite 4010CDT laptop and a Dell Latitude XPi CD. Both machines were running newly installed RedHat 6.0 (CDROM from CheapBytes).
Seems weird, but if you have time to look into it, would be great.
Can you send us the contents of /proc/interrupts on these laptops, before starting esd, after starting esd, and after reproducing the bug? Please also run 'strace -e open,ioctl,close -o esd.trace esd' and send the resulting esd.trace file.
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